3: Trump, Gaza, and the Rule of Law

Hi, I’m Jesse Hirsch and I’m here with my friend Alan Gregg.

And welcome to Red Tory.

And, you know, in the last 48 hours since our last episode, much has changed.

The world still seems to be in constant reaction to the Trump administration.

And in particular, I kind of chose the phrase Gaza and the rule of law, but they’re kind of two separate topics.

Although I kind of see how they could connect, although I don’t want to anticipate that.

But I think we’re going to start every issue, Alan, by me throwing to.

You and saying, hey, Alan, what have.

You been paying attention to?

What do you think we should start with?

Well, before we start anywhere, I mean, what happened to our theme music?

I thought we were going to have something that was like the Clash, something that was punk.

You’ve got.

You’ve got music here that sounds like it comes from a game show.

So that is an excellent starting point.

What you just heard was exactly what AI Gets when I put in punk.

And I’ve done it, I’ve done it six times because I’m only allowed to, like, generate one song a day.

So we got a new gag.

Tomorrow I will have a new AI Generated.

Or the next episode, I will have a new AI Generated theme song.

And we’ll start by you going, no, no, we’re not there yet.

We’re not there yet.

Sorry for starting with the non separate.

I mean, that was great.

Like everyone.

I mean, you cannot not be seized by what’s going on in Washington right now.

And, you know, the most bizarre of everything that’s happened over the last two and a half, half weeks has to be Trump’s statement about owning Gaza, because it really does come out of nowhere.

And it’s also incomprehensible against any kind of yardstick that we’ve used about, you know, foreign power, foreign influence, certainly emanating out of, out of the Western world.

You know, there is a playbook here, I think, and we’re going to talk about that.

But it, it really is head scratching.

This is the kind of thing that, you know, I go to the grocery store and people are stopping me and just saying, you know, what, what’s happening?

And these are people who normally don’t follow politics, who aren’t seized by the news, and everyone knows what’s going on in a way that I don’t know, that I’ve ever seen over the course of my professional career, that these people are that consumed with the chaos that’s emanating, as I say, out of the White House.

Well, and I do want to spend some time today talking about Gaza and Palestine and Israel, the Mideast in general, because it has been such a loaded subject for months, if not years.

But I watched the press conference with Trump around this announcement, and granted, this is a press corps that’s already been bullied, that’s already had their most vocal critics removed, and it was still like, what do you mean we’re gonna occupy Gaza?

Like, what are you gonna build there?

Like, there was just.

It was gobsmack.

Well, and apparently not just the press gallery was gobsmacked.

Many of his advisors, where this came right out of the Netanyahu meeting.

Yeah, Netanyahu sitting right there on the podium.

They had to talk about it.

Well, that was the other interesting part.

Netanyahu had the biggest shit eating grin I’ve ever seen.

Like, and he had this.

When, when he was sitting, he had this full kind of man’s posture with.

His legs spread, and he looked like just the happiest boy in the world.

And again, everyone else is like, what do you mean, Trump?

Like, like, is this gonna be a Trump resort?

Right.

Like, the way he’s describing it, he sounds like a real estate guy pitching this big development while everyone’s going, you.

Realize this is the most contested land in the world.

Yeah.

Those who claim to know say that there are three things that are at work here in terms of his mindset.

One is he is quite obsessed with peace in the Middle east that he sees.

You know, if he had any kind of foreign policy success in his first term, it was the Abraham Agreements.

And then he really does believe he can use Saudi Arabia to change things around in the Middle East.

Second, at the risk of giving him maybe more credit than he deserves, apparently he really was taken aback by this extent of devastation.

And anyone who’s watched, I mean, it really is.

Without sounding like I’m supporting Donald Trump, you have to ask yourself, how in the foreseeable future can this physical space be occupied in any kind of livable way?

And the third is him and Jared Kushner, you know, seeing this as a real estate play, that it’s right before the war started.

I mean, Beirut was considered by many people to be the most beautiful city in the.

In the world.

I mean, you know, Israel is right on the ocean.

I mean, it’s right there.

It’s absolutely beautiful.

Gaza should be a Mediterranean kind of lovely place to be.

But the confluence of those three things at one time to all of a sudden, you know, spew out the vomit that was the press of just, you know, last night is pretty.

Pretty inconceivable.

Well, and part of me was so taken by the news, by how dramatic this is, that I wanted to right away start kind of posting about it and writing about it.

But then I remembered that the whole thing, the Trump campaign, the regime, rather, is doing right now, is distracting everybody from other stuff.

This is, granted, not really a distraction.

This is, to your point, a massive policy announcement.

He’s clearly looking at a huge foreign policy victory.

And to your point, I’m also wondering about how this is gonna fly in Saudi Arabia, because where the regime.

Yeah, where the regime may be able to see the strategic or the.

The populace is not gonna like this.

At all, especially across the Middle East.

This is gonna be hugely unpopular in the Arab street, as it used to be called, historically.

Well, and the rumors have that he has been talking about this casually for the last two months.

But the announcement clearly came without any consultation whatsoever.

I mean, I was the press and a lot of his advisors stunned.

But as you note, Saudi Arabia says, no, we’re not on board here.

Egypt has said we’re not on board.

Jordan has said, we’re not on board.

And we can get into this more also, as the conversation proceeds.

You also have to believe that MAGA is not on board with this sort of thing.

I mean, big part, or at least a part of the embrace of the Trump way is isolationism, and it’s, you know, make America great.

Again, the emphasis isn’t so much on making it great.

It’s, again, it’s nostalgic.

They want to go back.

They do not want to be, you know, going forward.

The greatness.

I think, again, this is classic.

Trump is demonstrating that he cannot be stopped all by itself is a goal.

It’s not a means to an end that you cannot stop me.

And that’s how great America is right now, that we can do whatever the fuck we want and no one can do a goddamn thing about it.

And to your point, I think as part of our combined analysis, we should keep an eye on this schism between the Steve Bannon wing of MAGA and the Elon Musk Dark Maga, as he likes to call it, because that’s what you’re describing.

And Bannon is absolute up in arms.

And he’s been in the New York Times lately.

He’s so upset that it’s interesting, the.

Enemy of my enemy is my friend type stuff.

But I wouldn’t underestimate, especially as to your point, if Trump keeps getting away with this that there will be the MAGA people who don’t realize America’s imperial legacy.

They don’t know about the Philippines.

Right.

They don’t realize that Puerto Rico is part of America imperial.

And so I think if this works they could get onside.

But I still don’t see this working.

This still strikes me as, to your point, an arrogant guy who wants a foreign policy accomplishment.

And I do want to talk about Gaza and how Gaza got basically wiped, got leveled absolutely, completely.

But back to the kind of political, domestic American dynamics of this.

I mean they are leaning hard into both the kind of Zionist American Jewish constituency which I think didn’t feel that Biden was supporting them sufficiently.

Like I think there is a real paranoia amongst the kind of right wing North American Jews who are like there’s no one there for us.

He’s leaning hard into that.

But I think it’s important to emphasize he’s leaning hard into the evangelicals.

Right, because they’re pro Israel.

Very.

And a lot of people don’t get that.

They don’t understand that, you know, this isn’t just a pro Jewish policy, this is a very pro Christian policy because.

They believe that they want the end of the world to happen in Israel so that they get their second coming of the Messiah.

And it’s weird for me to see Trump play that cuz he’s again the.

Opposite of who these evangelicals would like in terms of a thug.

But he’s so wise, just playing their note, playing that kind of dog whistle in a way that scares me.

Well, we touched on that a little bit couple days ago that when cynicism becomes as deep and as rampant as it is when you believe that all politicians are sleazy, lying, crooked, corrupt, horrid pieces of shit.

And then someone says, well, Donald Trump is a sneaky, lying, callous, horrid piece of shit.

The average person says, yeah, he’s a politician, but he delivers for the evangelicals.

And you know, he’s got 80% of that support base.

And so he will play to that because that’s a constituency that, you know, he witnessed the Democrats that you can’t afford to ignore or you ignore at your peril.

But back on the domestic politics in addition, I mean this.

And it’s a repeated pattern now of territorial ambition.

It’s, you know, the Panama Canal, it’s Greenland, it’s now Gaza, it’s arguably Canada as part of this.

Not only was this not part of the Trump agenda, this would be anathema to most people.

Who embraced the Trump agenda of America first.

It’s like we shouldn’t care about, in Trump’s words, these shithole countries, you know, that should be someone else’s concern, not ours.

The notion that he’s occupying that kind of terrain, pardon the pun, I think, you know, puts him at significant political risk with that base that is expecting, you know, manufacturing to grow in the Northeast again.

That’s what they’re looking for.

Not looking for a Riviera in, in Gaza.

And what wasn’t clear in the press conference he had, because this was the question that a lot of American reporters were asking, is the extent to which this is boots on the ground.

Right.

The extent to which these will be American soldiers on the ground in Gaza.

That could be its own catastrophe, its own distraction when it comes to the.

Palestinians are not going to give up Gaza ever.

Right.

And that support, even if it’s not physically, even if they’re able to physically occupy that land, there is still going to be violence targeting that land, no matter who is on it.

And we keep on seeming to forget that fundamental fact of human existence.

I mean, I remember seeing an interview with a young Palestinian woman.

This is just after the Hamas Israeli conflict started.

And she was a medical student, articulate, smart, and, you know, they said, and what are you looking forward to right now?

And she said, revenge.

Yeah.

You know, you can’t throw a bomb into someone’s wedding party and kill them all and expect the grandchildren are going to think you’re a good guy.

Yeah.

You know, you invade.

I was also.

I’m also watching, rewatching a fantastic documentary series, Vietnam, the war that changed America, with that incredible on the ground live footage, historical footage that they were able to capture at the time.

And again, you can’t help but watching this.

Onto the boots on the ground is that when you invade someone else’s country, they don’t give up.

Ask the Ukrainians, you know, and how well is invading someone else’s country worked for any invader in the last.

In the last 70 years?

Not well.

And to your point, what the Vietnam War changed in terms of both military tactics and public perception was the media, was the fact that it was the first war where you could not control the narrative, and it’s been that way ever since.

And another thread I want us to keep watching in the weeks and months to come, as we look at the Trump administration, is the extent to which they want to provoke.

Right.

Like that was my point.

Do they want to provoke a response in Gaza?

Do they want to Escalate Midi’s conflict.

And similarly, by being so brazen, is he trying to provoke protest at home?

Is he trying to provoke this response at home?

Because I do want to talk about the FBI and the extent to which that I agree with you the FBI’s counterterror capacity is being sabotaged.

But I want to share this and I’ll email it to you and I’ll put it in the show links.

One of my favorite podcasts is called Intelligence Matters, and it was originally created by the former acting director of the CIA.

And it kind of was an official podcast for the US Intelligence community.

It was originally run by cbs.

It’s now run privately by a kind of bioterrorism monitoring firm.

They had this week the recently retired head of IDF intelligence, the Israeli Defense Force intelligence agency.

So not the Mossad, but the military intelligence for the IDF.

And they broke down October 7th.

They broke down the war against Hezbollah, they broke down the war against Hamas.

Fascinating conversation for anyone’s interested in this stuff, because it was a really sober analysis from a professional, an Israeli, on what’s going on.

And there were two things that I took to that to your point, Hezbollah may be down, but they are not out.

Right.

They may be down for a couple of years, it may be a long time.

But this was a head of intelligence.

Saying after discussing how they were very effective in neutralizing them, he said, you will never neutralize them.

They will always have a new generation that will always have a new desire to come back.

It’s estimated that there’s between 10 and 15,000 new recruits to Hamas since October 7th.

Yeah, and that’s just a natural reproduction of invasion.

But back again to motivation.

I mean, there’s been some talk about the anchor theory of negotiation.

This is where you set out an anchor right out of the gate before anyone has even discussed what might be on the table.

And you, you know, he used it in real estate all the time saying, you know, okay, we have a plan to build a slaughterhouse next to your apartment building.

And they get into negotiation about building the slaughterhouse.

And so finally he breaks down and says, okay, no, we won’t do the slaughterhouse.

We’ll just do a 50 story building.

And they say, thank Christ, no slaughterhouse.

You know, they never wanted a 50.

And I mean, there’s again speculation that this is just basically calling out the people who actually have some responsibility to try to find a solution in the States, because he believes they left to their own devices, they will not.

And so if this is the alternative solution, that America owning Gaza being right in the middle of the Middle East.

See how you like that.

Saudi Arabia.

Yeah.

See how you like that.

Even Israel.

I mean, the far right in Israel might think that’s.

That’s all right because.

Because they just see that as an open door for more settlement and take over of the entire west bank as well.

But the, you know, and if that’s the case, it really is.

You know, I think Einstein once said, he says, you know, God doesn’t play dice with the universe.

You shouldn’t be playing dice with the prospect of global conflict.

No, not at all.

And while Iran is certainly also knocked on their butt from the recent Israeli attacks against their proxies, I think to your point, Trump is trying to communicate to them a new set of expectations.

The last point I wanted to make about that interview with the intelligence chief is he described their operations to free hostages.

And this is again, after really establishing the prowess and the capability of the Israeli intelligence apparatus.

And he goes, anytime we thought we had them, they changed everything, Everything.

And we were stuck.

We were lost.

Right.

There was fundamentally, with all of our military might, with all of our intelligence capability, we could get, at best, 1% of the hostages.

And every time we did, they responded with their defenses.

And he said that this kind of tactic moving forward is what we’re going to see because it’s emotional, it’s symbolic, and it’s very, very difficult to respond to.

And that, to your point, of American soldiers, right.

Or American personnel, that complicates things entirely.

For sure.

For sure.

But again, we’re going back to the Vietnam thing.

Again, you’re seeing these military operatives saying, you know, we cannot believe what remarkable fighters the Viet Cong are, that we would love to have 200 fighters that are as good as these guys in our troops.

But when someone is invading your land, I mean, not only is your bravery, you know, out the window, your innovation.

And let me tell you, those guys could kill you with their baby finger.

And the notion that that, as you.

As you say that that level of sophistication and security and intelligence was completely befuddled by a country that doesn’t even have running water, for Christ’s sake, is just testament to the level of resistance that is on the ground and in the tunnels.

And, you know, not to get off track, but to bring it back to what we were saying.

Last episode about the ndp, their complete silence on the Palestinian issue is why they are underperforming.

Because a lot of the left, especially a lot of the visible minority left, is pro Palestine.

And the protests that have been happening in Toronto, in Montreal since October 7th in favor of Palestine has been a huge coalition for a lot of left wing groups, a lot of radical Jewish groups, and the fact that it is in no way represented in the North American public discourse is a problem.

Well, I’m not saying it should be.

Widely held, but I’m saying there should be people saying, hey, what about Palestine?

Well, you mentioned Biden.

I mean, you know, he faced a lose, lose proposition.

You know, by trying to have a moderate middle position, he alienated the, you know, the Christian right, he alienated the more Orthodox Jews, but he also alienated young people who are the basis of democratic support.

So he.

So the politics of the issue in the Western world just adds to the turmoil on the ground in the Middle east itself, informing an intractable kind of problem where it’s almost impossible to bring the sides together in any venue to find accommodation.

Well, and to your point, I think this is going to be, I was going to say a snowballing hot potato.

I think this is going to be a growing problem and I think it’s going to hamper the kind of center left in North America until it becomes a little clearer how they can articulate a position without being seen as anti Semitic, while at the same time I think this is going to get ugly.

Because here’s the last thing I kind of want us to look at here.

The other analysis I saw of this, which I have to admit as a lawyer, I don’t fully understand, but it seemed it rang true, was we are witnessing the end of the post World War II human rights era.

That the way in which, again, we don’t know how Trump is going to play this Gaza thing out, but if it as blatantly ignoring what Israel’s been doing in Gaza up to this point because there is a proceeding in the International Criminal Court, there’s a lot of people saying, hey, there’s a lot of human.

If it completely wipes it off the.

Map, combined with usaid, combined with the NGO American scene being devastated by lack.

Of government funding, this could be the end of the human rights era in terms of what it was in the post World War II period.

Ideally, it becomes something new.

It’s not like all these activists and lawyers are going to retire and go away.

But it does seem like it’s a new configuration of foreign policy or of diplomacy.

If we’re just saying, yeah, this human rights stuff doesn’t really matter, might is right.

Yeah.

I mean, I’m not as pessimistic as you.

I talked a little bit earlier about the strength of civil society and civil engagement and attachment and, you know, the willingness to fight for freedoms, the willingness to fight for what is right is pretty, pretty deep in the DNA, even in the face of all the adversary that we’re seeing right now.

Right on.

I hope you’re right.

And I think Palestine is going to be one of those issues that pushes people out of their comfort zone when dealing with.

You’re right.

To the extent that, I mean, Trump again is also talking about defunding the United nations, defunding the International Criminal Court, you know, let alone things like who it’s like what.

But yeah.

And a lot of those agencies, while they could continue without U.S.

funding, they get a lot like it’s a huge, huge part of their budget for sure.

I wanted to use that as a kind of segue because I’ve been kind of.

And this may be premature and hyperbolic and I love doing both that this FBI, Department of Justice thing is about the rule of law and that fundamentally what we’re seeing is not just an attempt by the executive to consolidate power, but we are seeing a threat to the rule of law as we know it.

Because it’s hard for me to analyze this attack on the Department of Justice and the FBI in other terms, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on sort of where.

And these are early days, but where.

You see this playing out.

Oh, you’re absolutely right.

I mean, it’s an outright act of vengeance.

I mean, if you look at the questionnaire that was sent to Those FBI agents, 5,000 of them, clearly they’re trying to hunt them down vis a vis 1-6-6 and even Mar a Lago.

But the thing that’s really interesting for me, and we’ve talked offline a little bit about of this is, you know, as much as people admire Trump’s ability to seize the news agenda and to capture public sentiment and public opinion for all, as nutty as he might be, it is pretty impressive that he’s gone on when two elections and dominate politics in a way that we haven’t seen over the last decade, I mean, we talk about virtually nothing else.

I mean, look at late night television.

Their entire monologue stand up to this day is still Trump.

That’s the only subject they can, I mean, they can address.

Look at us hopefully we do better in the future.

But it’s hard not to talk about.

It, but it’s true.

And that’s all they’re, they’re focused on.

That all said, and he surrounded himself now with what you call the broligarchy and all these incredibly smart guys.

And you know, as again, disruptive as he might be, you, Elon Musk is a smart guy.

You don’t start four different businesses like that and succeed in all of them without have something going on.

And then I end up at the right hand of the President of the United States.

Although at the same time, that all said, it’s just like the kind of the masters of the universe, you know, in the Wall street greed era.

These guys believe their own press clippings because they are billionaires.

They believe they’re genius.

I’ve worked with CEOs, you know, for my entire life and they truly believe they’re good at one thing.

They’re good at everything.

And they do not understand government.

They do not have a clue about how government works.

And they underestimate how government works.

Having said, I’ve worked with CEOs my entire adult life.

Maybe one out of 10 are as smart as a deputy Minister in the government of Canada or Director General of the United States.

Maybe one in ten that might be generous on the CEO’s part.

The people who go into public office go in there.

Not only are they smart as hell, but they go in there because they believe in public service.

And so they are motivated by the jobs that they do.

And if Elon Musk and Patel and Trump think they’re going to take on the Department of Justice and the FBI, they are, as you said in your substack today, they’re going into a gunfight with knives.

They will get sabotaged in this and they don’t have a clue.

They won’t even know where it’s coming from.

I remember.

Go on.

I was gonna say.

Let me ask you two follow up questions on that.

But a quick correction.

Did you know that Elon Musk has never started a company?

This is part of his myth.

I don’t disagree with you that he is a very formidable villain and really smart and capable leader.

Perhaps we underestimate him at our peril, but he actually hasn’ started any of These companies, he’s really good at coming in, taking them over and then making them successful with his ego and his tentacles.

Because that is a really powerful part of his myth that I think it’s important that we correct on.

But two quick follow up questions.

One, I agree with you that they have no clue how government works.

Do you think fundamentally though, they’re just trying to burn it down.

And second, shout out to Nick Charney, who gave us a really good endorsement on LinkedIn.

I’m a little worried about the demographics of some of these professional leaders in the public sector, that some of them are just going to go, fuck it, I’m out of here.

Right?

They all have pensions, they’ve got.

And as I say, you know, if you’re a prosecutor in the Department of Justice, trust me, you’re talented.

Like, really talented.

You graduated right at the top of your law school.

So it’s not like you don’t have a tool belt that isn’t portable.

I mean, you could go into a big Wall street firm at any time.

But as I say, there’s something that is enduring about civil service.

And again, anecdotally, I’ll never forget, I remember one of the ministers I was doing some work for wanted again to cut the budget in the Department of Fisheries.

And because that’s where, where he was, that was his mandate and he was a fiscal conservative.

And so he mandated the, the Deputy Minister to go and do a complete inventory of all the cuts that could be made in the Department of Fisheries.

And he came back with his list.

And what was right at the top of the list was a dock that was in the minister’s writing.

You know, we’re gonna, we’ll just knock this dock down.

That’s in your writing right away.

And all of a sudden the minister was going, no, I didn’t mean that.

Well, we’ve done the analysis and it’s far and away the most wasteful spending that we’re doing in the Ministry of Fisheries.

So just the fact that the fishermen in your constituency are not going to have a dock tie their boats up anymore shouldn’t bother you.

Minister, we’re doing the right thing.

Now, that’s anecdotal, it’s superficial, it’s silly, but it just.

There is a culture within bureaucracy, there’s a culture within government.

They know how the system works.

They know how to stop the system, they know how to sabotage the system, they know how to, you know, facilitate the system.

You know, are they all super people?

No.

But are they all lazy?

Dummies who want to go home at 4:00 in the afternoon?

No chance, buddy, no chance.

And that’s where in particular you know, you’re talking about district attorneys.

But in the senior ranks of the FBI, you have some incredibly smart and incredibly talented people.

And furthermore, people who are committed to the rule of law, people who, like us, are seeing these actions and are going, wait a minute, this is not right.

This is not constitutional.

I don’t have the names offhand, but I printed three in the substack today of leaders who are standing up to Musk, who are standing up to Trump.

It’s rare for these types of officials to publicly do so.

I think to your point, they’re more likely to do so behind the scenes.

But I am encouraged by this.

But at the same time, to what extent do you expect there to be some kind of conflict?

To go back to the metaphor of bringing a butter knife to a gunfight, because the FBI, this is not a powerless organization.

And the consequence of them becoming a political law enforcement, an arm of the executive in a kind of corrupt regime.

Again, I think I share that same hope you do in these professional civil servants.

But I’m curious, kind of how you think this is going to play out just so that we can start looking for some of the symptoms or some of the kind of canaries in the proverbial coal mine.

We were talking about this before then.

The J.

Edgar Hoover biography.

G Man here was a guy who withstood.

I can’t even count the number of presidents, but from Woodrow Wilson right up to lbj, they couldn’t get him out of there.

Now, granted, they’re putting Kash Patel in there, but there is a culture within the FBI.

There’s a culture within the military, there’s a culture within the Department of Justice.

And part of that culture is a culture of excellence, that we really are here doing the right thing because we are the best and brightest.

And they will find ways.

I mean, I can’t predict precisely what they are, but they will find ways to stymie these efforts and possibly sabotage these efforts.

You want to read another book to kind of show how far this can go?

The brothers, the Dulles brothers, when John was the Secretary of State and Alan was head of the CIA.

I mean, these two guys basically together, unbeknownst to Eisenhower, who looked like a really, really nice and enlightened post military guy.

I mean, we’re overthrowing regimes all over the planet by, you know, harnessing all kinds of levers and military influence that the average person in the White House and political office had no idea even exist, existed.

And, you know, so in this regard, there is a deep state, and it isn’t a deep state that’s working against Donald Trump.

It’s a deep state that exists to.

That runs by a set of rules and a set of orders that is, you know, long standing, long respected, a big tradition, and that the people who occupy those positions embrace and identify with.

And they’ll.

They’ll also say, you know, presidents come and presidents go, and we’re here forever.

Well, and I want to tease that a bit, although, you know, to your point, I think in the danger in acknowledging that the civil service is a kind of deep state, it does empower the kind of maga simplicity or delusion that it can all be removed and society can still function.

And the argument I make is the German state back then was pretty simple.

It was not even comparable to the administrative state that we have today.

And so it’s really not feasible for it to be politically controlled or taken over in the way that the Nazis did.

Although I still am a little concerned at Musk’s ability to intimidate and automate and eliminate as much of the workforce as possible.

And I’m still not 100% certain that.

That it is possible.

But AOC Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had a live stream last night which was very popular, and she argued that the reason he’s doing this is to pay for the tax cut, that they need $4 trillion in the budget to pay for the extension of the tax cut that will expire this year, and that that’s why they’re gutting the budget, is they need that $4 trillion to pay off to the American wealthy.

But to your point, I think the consequences of all this is a whole other crisis unto itself.

Well, you say a lot there.

I mean, first on the notion that this is all done in aid of the tax cut.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that you can cut all 3 million employees and you’re not even going to come close to the $4 trillion needed for the tax.

I mean, 90% of, you know, government funding goes direct transfers to institutions and individuals.

So you want to cut Medicaid, you want to cut Social Security, you want to cut, you know, farm subsidies.

Good luck with that.

See how far they go.

Back on the earlier point, I’m not saying that these things are not real, nor are they a threat.

But it touches on something we were talking about earlier, this notion that you can’t do anything to stop it, and this belief within the White House that no one can do anything to stop it.

All they have to do is just go out there and do whatever the hell they want to do.

And that they will be able to do it because of their mandate or the stupidity, the evilness, or the incompetence of the organizations they’re going after is a big mistake on their part.

They are wildly underestimating how strong those guardrails are, both within the civil service and also within civil society.

Well, and not just aoc, but the Democrats have woken up that in the last day.

They did a rally yesterday, which was the Elon was not elected rally.

And Schumer’s now using language of coup like they are, I think, starting to recognize that there has to be both a cultural and political will to stand up to this stuff, to embolden the civil service again.

The six engineers, the six kids who are working with Elon Musk on a technical level to take over these government systems.

The other podcast I listen to almost every day is called the Cyber Wire, and it’s basically a news show coming from the cybersecurity industry, and it’s run out of Maryland, and it’s tied to the, you know, the Washington apparatus that protects the nation’s digital infrastructure.

And their top story was, this is the greatest cybersecurity breach in the history of cybersecurity that, you know, these guys.

Are giving these young kids access to.

Yeah, yeah, because the argument that they’re all making is these kids are using their personal laptops.

That is contrary to government policy.

That’s contrary to NSA policy.

Ask Hillary Clinton about her emails.

Right?

And their whole point is you can guarantee that Chinese intelligence, that Russian intelligence, that North Korean, Iranian, have all hacked these kids laptops and are all using it to piggyback into the opm, into treasury, into all these places that they’re accessing.

This is literally the biggest hack in the history of hacking.

And the argument that I made as an extension of that is, why are they arresting these kids?

They know who they are.

They know where they are.

They know the crimes being committed.

If I was Congress, if I was Democrats, I would be fighting at least enough Republicans.

And there’s a few coming to say.

Come on, we gotta do something.

Well, let’s dig deeper into that because you raised the Democrats.

But for me, what is even more astounding is the Republicans, because we know that the Republicans to a person do not buy into this agenda or this behavior.

Not to a person, though.

No, not to a person.

But to a person, you don’t hear any protest.

But I mean, we have on record Lindsey Graham saying what he thinks.

We have on Record Mitch McConnell saying what we think we have, you know, Collins, what she is saying.

And again, someone who’s been around politicians and politics for a long time and admit there has been, I think, an erosion in the quality of individuals.

I mean, when I started politics, the notion that a Marjorie Taylor Greene could be in there or Matt Gaetz was unfathomable.

And but they, the people who came into public life came in there with all these good intentions of doing to a person, of doing something really, really important that they believed in and they thought was good for not just them, but for the larger entity.

And maybe they might have got a little bit corrupt or complacent over, over time, but that was their original motivation.

Now things have changed, but they haven’t changed in a wholesale way.

So I get elected as a member of Congress, I’m a Republican member of Congress and you know, I probably have some standing in the community because, you know, you don’t get elected unless you get name recognition that’s at least equal to your opponent in politics.

So you’ve got some self esteem, so you’ve got some legacy, you’ve got some credentials for what you’ve done, you go to Washington and you’re going to make a difference to this and then you just basically do whatever you’re told to do and if you kind of say something that sounds a little contrary to what you’re supposed to do, that you’re threatened in the primary and you say, okay, these people care more about their job than mission.

But when your job gets to the point where you have no say in anything, including congressional spending, which is constitutionally your right, which is being taken away, at some point you’ve got to believe that kind of complacency and that lap dog behavior that we’re seeing right now from all rank and file Republicans has got to start to crack.

It just, it just has to.

Yeah.

And not to bring us full circle.

This is why I think that FBI DOJ conflict is so important.

Because if for whatever reason the FBI and the DOJ fold and they become a kind of political police, that’s where you have the intimidation power to keep those Republicans in line.

But conversely, if we start seeing, because.

A lot of the members of the FBI and the DOJ are Republicans.

If we start seeing, yeah, if we start seeing them stand up, maybe even resign and get rewarded with like book deals and like other stuff.

I think you’re right.

I think that could create the moral high ground for there to be more Liz Cheneys, for there to be more Republicans who stay true to their ideals but speak out against this attack, against the rule of law.

I hope that that happens sooner rather than later.

I think your argument there for sort of why that could happen is strong.

But as an example of how absurd.

You mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.

So I may be getting his last name wrong, but Josh Harley or Josh Hawley, who is a senator and a total idiot, he just introduced legislation that would make, I think it was either $100,000 fine or a million dollar fine to any American if they download Deep Seq or if they use any Chinese AI app or if they contribute to any Chinese AI initiative.

And everyone was laughing because every single AI American AI company employs Chinese researchers, of course, and uses the same Chinese software like everyone’s using everyone’s software.

It’s a research community.

And he’s trying to pass this draconian.

Law that basically says, no, you can’t touch any Chinese AI, can’t give any data.

So I agree with you.

There are some people with integrity within at least the Senate of the Republican Party.

But they also are starting to get more idiots who are just puppets of the Trump regime.

And I’m prepared to believe that a lot of them are, but not 100% of them.

Yes, I agree it’s beyond the pale.

And they only need a few.

Right.

This is why I think the more that Trump overreaches, the more that Democrats should be standing up and taking a firm and moral standard that will put pressure, especially some of those Republicans who are in purple states.

Right.

Who, you know, you could easily see that swing and in order to preserve their job, could see opportunities for bipartisanship.

But.

Well, and we know that the enemy of incumbent presidents is off your elections.

And you know, those are only 20 months away and they’ll start in less than 12 months away.

Yeah.

In a serious way.

Now, I did hear a great joke which was actually posted as a comment on my substack, which is Americans don’t need to fear a coup because there aren’t any US Embassies in America.

To your point about the Dulles brothers.

Well, and also, far be it for me to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but coups often start within the intelligence branch of government and military branch of government.

And again, I’m not suggesting that we see anything that is quite that extreme, but functional coups, I mean, I could see starting to boil up.

Well, and you heard it here first.

Called out on Red Torrey, the counter coup.

Any final comments before we call it an evening?

No, I think we’re starting to find our rhythm here a little bit.

We’re going to start getting guests fairly soon, which will be exciting.

I mean, we agreed that we would give this a go, and if we were barking at the moon for the first little while, that was fine.

We’d find our rhythm.

Get a.

Get a.

And.

And even if, you know, we didn’t, the conversation’s always great.

Jessica.

Yeah, no, this was fantastic.

And, you know, as soon as I saw Trump and Netanyahu together, I was like, oh, I got to talk to Alan.

So it’s definitely creating for at least.

My mental health a good pattern moving forward.

So thanks again.

Shout out to Nick Charney.

Shout out to David Fin Groot, Bill Fox, Brian Trapani.

We’re getting really good attention.

And Bob Lewis also sent his regards.

So our.

Our love is with you and Sally, and otherwise, we hope to see everybody soon.

Take care.

Take care.